


Ghost Wolf

by Island_of_Reil



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Bathing/Washing, Canon Era, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Hypothermia, Medical Examination, Military, Nursing, Rescue, Rivers, Supernatural Elements, Titans, Wolf Cubs, Wolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-26
Updated: 2014-10-26
Packaged: 2018-02-22 17:30:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2516009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"But then again," Sasha continued, "there are some spirits that are on humanity's side. Like the Ghost Wolf."</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ghost Wolf

“I don’t like this,” Sasha muttered to no one in particular as they tramped along, fresh-fallen leaves crunching under their boots. “We shouldn’t be out here at night this time of year.”

“Why not?” Mina asked. “It’s nice out here. Not that cold yet, but we’re not sweating our asses off, either.”

“Well—” Sasha’s voice plunged dramatically. “—you know how there are the walls between us and the outside world? There’s a wall between us and the spirit world, too, even though you can’t see it. This time of year, it gets real thin, and things can pass through it. And so can we.”

Jean rolled his eyes. “Oh, jeez. What kind of hick bullshit is that?”

Sasha’s eyes narrowed. “It’s not bullshit! It’s true!”

“Yeah, sure. Do the ‘spirits’ come through this ‘wall’ and steal all your potatoes?”

Several people around them snickered. Sasha punched Jean in the arm and ducked his return swing. Marco, who was marching behind him, frowned. “Jean, stop being a dick,” he said.

“Are you really that worried?” Armin asked Sasha. It did sound to him like she was getting anxious over something unlikely to happen. On the other hand he didn’t want her to think he was taking Jean’s side. “I haven’t heard of anything like that before, or read about it.”

“Well… some of the old folks in Dauper, they used to tell stories. A man might go for a walk in the woods, or a girl might go to the well to get water, and no one’d ever see them again.”

“But people can go missing any time of year,” Armin pointed out. “They run off, or someone attacks them. Or they have accidents. It’s started to get dark early, and the leaves on the ground get slippery from rain and mold. People drink a little more because it makes them feel warmer. So they lose their way at night, slip and fall, hit their heads and pass out, fall into rivers — and if they’re drunk, they die of the cold faster. Maybe it just gets noticed more when people disappear this time of year?”

Sasha furrowed her brow. “Maybe… but, in those stories, nobody ever finds the bodies, or even bits of the bodies. Animals always leave something behind, even if it’s just a piece of cloth caught on a thorn. It’s like the people never existed.”

“No, sometimes animals drag their prey away whole,” Marco said.

“Sure, but then there’d be tracks,” Sasha replied. “Paw prints, and marks on the ground from the body being dragged. But in these stories, there’s nothing at all to be found.” Nobody said anything for a moment, although Jean snorted and rolled his eyes.

“But then again,” she continued, “there are some spirits that are on humanity’s side. Like the Ghost Wolf.”

Armin blinked. “The what?”

“Ghost Wolf,” Sasha repeated. “A big grey she-wolf with a den full of cubs. They say there were some men hunting outside Wall Maria, years ago, around this time of year…”

“Were they Survey Corps?” Eren asked from a few rows back.

“No, it was before the Survey Corps was formed. Not sure what they were doing out there. Maybe they were drunk, or out there on a dare. But they were hunting wolf pelts. They cornered a big grey wolf, and then one of them noticed her teats hanging low — shut up, Jean, that’s what they’re called!”

“So he had a thing for wolf tits?” Jean said, still smirking. “And then he fucked her, so now there’s a half-man, half-wolf thing running around outside the walls?”

“So what, Jean?” Eren again. “Your mom fucked a horse, and now there’s a half-man, half-horse thing running around with the Trainee Legion.”

Jean whipped around and pushed Marco and Daz aside to grab Eren by the collar. It took Marco, Armin, Daz, and Mina a good minute to separate them and convince them that they needed to calm down before they got Commander Shadis’s attention and all of them ended up running laps in the wet leaves.

“So,” Sasha continued after they’d resumed marching forward again. “That man knew from her full teats that she had cubs, and he didn’t want to kill their mother, because they wouldn’t survive and that’d mean fewer wolves to hunt the next year. So he convinced the other hunters to let her go without a scratch. Then, not long after that, a titan came out of nowhere! And it was about to pick up the men and eat them, when the she-wolf appeared again and flew into the air and bit out the titan’s nape!”

Jean hooted. “And you believe that? Like a wolf can jump even five meters high, or it could get its jaws around a titan’s neck?”

Sasha’s eyes were wide. “But that’s the point! She _wasn’t_ a normal wolf! She was a ghost wolf, and she was thanking the men for saving her life!”

“Uh-huh,” Jean said. “Are there ghost potatoes, too? How about ghost rolls? Do they throw themselves in the faces of titans to protect people who didn’t eat them?” Half a dozen trainees snickered again. Sasha turned beet red and fell silent.

Armin said nothing, either. He didn’t believe the story any more than Jean did. Those men probably _had_ been drunk — if they’d existed in the first place, instead of having been made up by an actual drunk in a tavern. Also, it wasn’t like Survey Corps fatalities declined noticeably this time of year. But he was too tired from the long day’s march to want to argue. And Jean had already done enough arguing for three people anyway.

*

Half an hour later, Shadis ordered them to halt and make camp for the night. With a sharp exhalation of relief, Armin unshouldered his backpack and let it drop to the ground. Sleep would still be a few hours away, but at least now he could remain in one place.

He was sharing a tent tonight with Eren, Daz, and Mylius. After the long march, the four of them were moving with the force of habit rather than with any energy or thought, but it was enough to let them hammer the pegs into the ground, loop and tighten the ropes around them, and pitch the little canvas shelter. As soon as it was up, Eren slumped to the ground next to it, and Armin dropped down beside him.

“I could sleep for a week,” Eren said, throwing an arm over his face. “Right here, out in the damp and the cold.”

“So could I,” Armin muttered, his eyes starting to close.

“Neither of you are going to sleep just yet,” a harsh voice informed them.

Both of them were on their feet immediately, fists pressed to their hearts. _“Sir!”_ they shouted in unison.

“Arlert.” Shadis tossed something at Armin, who raised his arms and caught the sturdy oaken bucket. “We’re not far from the river. Get water.”

Two years ago, Armin’s face would have visibly fallen even while he hastened to obey. Since then he’d learned to shove the emotion, be it fatigue, fear, anger, or something else, to the back of his brain for as long as he stood in front of his superiors. “Sir,” he said crisply, his expression carefully blank. Nor, after so many survival hikes, did he have to ask anyone which way the river lay. A light northeast wind had come up, and its muddy, mineral tang cut through the smell of moldering leaves all around them.

As he turned in that direction he heard Shadis say, “Jaeger, go help Wagner gather firewood. Zeramuski, you and Braun dig the fire pit.”

“Sir,” came Eren’s and Mylius’s replies behind Armin. He didn’t catch whatever Shadis ordered Daz to do.

He allowed himself the luxury of a sigh once he was fully out of earshot. But there was no point lamenting that for now he’d have to keep plowing ahead through his exhaustion. That was the least of what soldiers were asked to do. And when you made camp, you had to draw water, you had to lay a fire, you had to supplement your rations with some game. Armin guessed that Sasha had been assigned that last task, accompanied by either Mikasa or Marco.

The night had settled in before they’d stopped. Though Armin’s night vision was reasonably good, he stepped slowly and deliberately through the trees, wary of roots, stones, or dips in the ground. The territory they were in, not far from Wall Rose, was on the hilly side. Here and there the land would rise under his feet and he’d emerge into a high clearing, and he’d take the opportunity to walk a little more briskly. But then the trees and brush would close in around him again, and he’d slow his pace, once again picking his way through them carefully.

The nearer he got to the river, the closer everything clustered, and the higher rose the underbrush. He had little trouble squeezing himself through copse after copse, no matter how narrow, and pulling the bucket along behind him. But each subsequent thicket bore nastier and nastier thorns, or so it seemed. He’d just begun to hear the telltale peeps of small frogs when he attempted to thread his body through yet another gap and something snarled in his hair.

Armin lowered the bucket to the ground as gently as he could so it wouldn’t roll away, then half-turned and reached upward to free himself. Slender wooden claws tore smarting lines into his cheeks and the backs of his hands. He hissed in pain but forced himself to keep trying to work what felt like buckthorn spines out of his hair. Freeing himself cost him a few minutes, a dozen strands of hair, and a light gash in his trousers over his left thigh. Eyes stinging with unshed tears, he retrieved the bucket and pressed forward.

The soft plash of water was stronger on this side of the natural hedge. After blinking his eyes clear, Armin could see the moon reflected in fast-moving ripples. The peeping of frogs was stronger now, and from somewhere upriver came the faint croaks of night herons. A midge buzzed by his face; he absentmindedly swatted at a second one as it grazed the opposite side of his head.

He’d drawn water any number of times on survival hikes, but usually from small streams, tributaries of the great rivers that crossed the walled lands and passed through arched openings in the walls. This was one of the great rivers, known as the Rasch. It began somewhere far to the east of where Wall Maria had once stood. It flowed slow and stately through the abandoned Karanese district, then through the small towns and woodlands of Ehrmich. But once it reached the hills of south-southwestern Rose, it began to pick up speed and earn its name. Armin’s understanding was that it was treacherous at points, but that the worst of those points lay in what had once been Maria.

He stood still for a moment, observing whatever details the moonlight had picked out in the ground and water that lay ahead of him. Then he continued to move forward, slowly and carefully, until he stood on the riverbank. As best he could tell, the Rasch was flowing maybe a third of a meter below the lip of the bank, thanks to plentiful early-autumn rain after a dry spring and summer. He sank into a crouch, bracing his left palm against the dirt of the bank, then leaned forward and down with the handle of the bucket in his right hand.

The earth crumbled beneath him.

Armin cried out in alarm. His right hand opened as that arm flailed for balance, the bucket flying away, and the fingers of his left hand scrabbled for purchase in dirt that was no longer there. A second later he hit the surface of the Rasch with a hard, reverberating smack. His mouth opened involuntarily at the shocking cold; water rushed into it before he could shriek.

Forcing his panic down and back as though Shadis were hovering before him, Armin tried to right himself in the stream. His head broke the surface, and he gasped and coughed and sputtered. He could swim — he’d learned long before the military — but his soaking-wet clothes hampered his strokes, his sturdy boots weighed him down, and the deep chill of the water was rapidly sapping his energy. He was barely, just barely, able to keep his mouth and nose above the surface, and seldom both at once.

The moon above him went out like a snuffed candle, then began to reappear in small glinting bursts here and there. The trees on either bank had grown over the river and joined at their tops — unlike in the relatively clear spot where he’d emerged from the buckthorn copse. _How far downstream am I already?!_ Along with the terror came a surge of strength, raw and preternatural. He managed to twist sideways, then struck out for the riverbank with desperate, lunging thrashes. He was within, he thought, a meter of it when he felt, rather than saw, the bend — and the drop.

This time, thrown nearly clear of the water for gut-churning seconds, Armin was able to scream.

The surface rose to meet him again with a second bone-jarring blow, and his own momentum plunged him a good meter below it. Thrashing furiously, he managed to raise his head again. He’d only just finished spewing out the water he’d swallowed and was gasping down as much air as he could when pain exploded through his forehead clear through to the back of his skull and the frigid, frothing Rasch winked out of existence.

*

He came to with yet another blow: the thump of his cheek against solid dirt peppered with small, sharp stones.

The roar of the water was yet close by. He wasn’t so much shivering as convulsing, all his muscles cramped and stiff, his hands throbbing from the bones outward, his feet without sensation inside his boots. His bladder felt ready to burst. Every part of him that the buckthorns had scraped stung anew, and the center of his forehead burned.

Armin opened his eyes.

The treetops above him were dark against the pale indigo of the sky, which was streaked with peach at the horizon. _… East?_ Or was it? Had he been out cold all day, too? What direction was he facing in? He tried to push himself up to see more, but his elbows had locked, and with a gasp he collapsed back down to what he guessed was the bank, shuddering violently.

Clearing his head was no easier. His brain felt full of the kind of clouds that portended snow, thick and grey and made of stiff air. Feeling any emotion was as difficult as thinking. A faint vibration deep in his head, something throwing itself against a cage made of cold, whispered, _Be afraid that you’re not afraid. You’re in danger._ Armin tried to amplify the thought, make it catch fire and drive him, but it fizzled out in his mind, nothing more than semi-meaningless words.

He sighed a stuttering sigh. The only feeling that seemed to matter right now was that his bladder was going to explode if he didn’t relieve himself, and he hadn’t made up his mind yet whether wetting his trousers would be the reasonable, easier alternative. He spent several minutes, or maybe hours, or maybe years trying to undo his fly with his leaden, trembling hands.

A few seconds after he’d given up, the ground shook underneath him.

Armin blinked. _Earthquake._ A word from his grandfather’s heretical book, a word he’d never heard another human speak. The earth was going to swallow him up. Maybe that was a good thing, because the book had also described fires far below the earth’s surface. He could get warm. Then he could dig himself out.

The ground shook again, harder this time.

_That’s… no… I…._

Dr. Jaeger’s books had described a substance called _adrenaline_ , the essence of fear and rage. Armin couldn’t remember where in the human body adrenaline was made. But he imagined he could feel a drop of it slide into his bloodstream, then another drop, then a steady drip that quickly became the flowing rush of an injection. He was still shaking, shaking so hard he could imagine his bones rattling against the inside of his stiff, cold skin. His muscles were still locked hard. But the thick, crystalline fog in his head was starting to clear.

That was when he smelled it. A stench as heavy as river water, a stench that hit him with yet another body blow. A stench he’d smelled before. Four years before.

_Go. Move. **Crawl.**_

Gasping hard, he turned himself belly down. 

_Claw._

His fingers wouldn’t flex, and his elbows almost wouldn’t bend. He rocked himself back and forth against the bank, throwing one stiff arm up and ahead, trying to drag the rest of his body after it. His bladder protested violently as he swung to and fro.

_Brush ahead. Thorns? Fuck it. Hide._

The thud this time was so close that the bank rippled beneath him, flinging him several centimeters into the air. Landing face down again knocked the breath out of his lungs and jarred his bladder painfully.

_Shit. Move. **Move!**_

Something caught the back of his collar.

_Thorns?_

A strong branch? Strong enough to lift him into the air?

_No…_

Even before he could see nothing but raw red muscle and viscera, steaming and stinking, he felt the blast of heat. Barely tolerable to most humans, agonizing against his waxen skin. Radiating toward him not only from the skinless torso, but from behind him, out of the gigantic palm that cupped his body. It raised him toward a massive toothed cavern of a maw that emanated the hot, fetid decay of a fully laden pyre. He began to heave not only with cold and fear but with nausea.

The hand was less than a meter from the mouth when the titan froze, and so did time. Years could have passed before its face went slack — and so did its hand.

Armin, in freefall, screamed.

He didn’t hit the ground. Something else yanked on the back of his collar.

His first addled impression was a new smell. Not pleasant, but not the open-grave stench of a titan. Musky, oily, tinged with dead leaf and cold rain. His second was the side of his body thumping now and again against something warm and thick and strong, but soft to the touch. His third was a fiery soreness that his thawing brain realized was the left side of his body, from waist to knee, being dragged along the ground at the speed of a galloping horse. And his fourth was a wet, warm sensation inundating his crotch and inner thighs.

 _So I pissed myself after all,_ Armin thought, and the world went dark again.

*

When he woke again, everything around him was still dark.

The first thing he registered was the newer smell, much stronger around him now, permeating everything. A heavy, musky, _animal_ smell, but, as before, laced with those of the forest. If he himself stank of urine or sweat, the musk drowned it out entirely. In his mind’s eye flashed an image of a dog shaking water from its coat.

But… there were no more dogs, other than a few guard dogs and racing and hunting hounds permitted to the monarchy and nobility. No other dogs in Sina. No dogs at all in Rose.

There were no titans in Rose, either.

He’d ponder that later. For now, Armin shook his head, trying to clear it so he could appraise his surroundings.

His side still throbbed dully, his hands and feet still ached, but he was no longer cold at all. Quite the opposite. He was… inside, somewhere. In a place that was small, confined, and warm. And full of fur.

_Fur?_

Fur that was warm, fur that moved slowly and gently as if with… breath.

Something small and wet and warm lapped his face, and from just behind it came a soft whimper that sounded distinctly canine.

“Hey,” Armin whispered, reaching out. He realized with a stab of sadness that he hadn’t seen a single dog since the fall of Shiganshina. They’d all been slaughtered for meat. Ultimately, nowhere near enough of it. He shoved the image of his grandfather down and back in his mind before his throat could tighten and his eyes could sting. So many people had died that the loss of nearly all dogs, and for that matter all but enough cats to patrol the fields for vermin, was something no one dwelt upon. Dogs were just another commonplace turned luxury for humanity.

But maybe some dogs had hidden in the woods of Rose and survived. Maybe these were feral pups.

His eyes were adjusting to the light now, what there was of it. A faint sliver in the distance that filtered toward wherever he was — _a den,_ he thought — and grew weaker and weaker until, when it reached him and the creatures around him, it cast no more than a fine, faint net of illumination. He blinked and squinted, trying to get a view of the pup that was enthusiastically licking his hand.

He slid his hand around its head, trying to substitute feel for vision. The ears were strangely short and broad, neither soft nor floppy. And its muzzle seemed long, and as sturdy as the ears. Almost like it wasn’t a dog, but a—

“Ow!”

Armin jerked his hand back. The pup hadn’t broken the skin, but its teeth were damned sharp and long for its age, and it had gnawed on one of the spots that had been lacerated by the buckthorns. The animal whined, affronted at having had its chewtoy taken away.

“Yeah, well, I _need_ this hand,” Armin muttered, rubbing the back of it with his other palm. But he felt buoyed by a vague sense of pleasure he hadn’t experienced in a long time. He and Eren had always talked to stray dogs they’d encountered, even petted them, despite dire warnings from their elders about fleas. Once or twice they’d fed them chestnuts that they’d pulled off trees, food that would have been welcome on their families’ own dinner tables. He’d missed, he thought, the simple, soothing feeling of talking to a creature that didn’t communicate back in words and that didn’t want much of you besides food and affection. Even if its idea of play was a little rough for someone covered in human flesh instead of fur.

The pup butted its head against Armin’s shoulder, seeking to be petted again. He realized his clothes were still damp, although some of the moisture had evaporated in the warmth of the den. Then he realized he was thirsty. He bunched up the outside of his right jacket breast and brought it to his lips, sucking as much moisture as he could from it. It wasn’t much, just enough to take the sandy feeling out of his mouth.

His boots were still full of water, judging by how his toes squelched against the inner soles. _I’m not **that** thirsty,_ he thought. Suddenly he remembered Shadis’s first-year lecture on the dangers of trench foot. Frowning, he sat up, gritting his teeth at the pressure on his raw-scraped left thigh, and pulled the boots off. He poured out whatever water he could before pushing them off to one side and trying to blot his soles against the floor of the den. Dirty, but dry at least.

A second pup draped itself over his insteps and toes. Its belly was pleasantly warm and soft against them, certainly more pleasant than if the animal had tried to chew on them instead. He could see, with a little more clarity now, two more pups nosing at the openings of his boots. A small one, possibly the runt, managed to wriggle halfway inside the right boot before changing its mind. It sat back on its haunches, head and shoulders buried in the boot leg and the foot hanging ludicrously in the air, and it whined piteously.

“You idiot,” Armin said, with amusement and fondness, as he pulled the boot off its head and set it down beside the left one. The freed pup yipped in relief and leapt onto his lap, tongue at the ready. Armin drew his arm protectively over his face, trying to keep his lips together as he smiled and scratched his thumbnail lightly over the animal’s head.

The den went completely dark.

Armin’s heart thumped once, hard, in his chest as he swung his head around and let the pup lick at his neck instead. He could hear faint, padding steps against dirt and pebbles, growing stronger and stronger. So was the musky, foresty smell. The sliver of light appeared again, seeming marginally stronger now. Its bottommost edge picked out a broad expanse of fur on a heavy shape that was drawing closer to the pups — and to Armin.

 _The mother,_ he thought, and suddenly he could hear his own heart throwing itself against his ribs. _I’m in her den. Between her and her pups._

The steps stopped right in front of him. Squealing excitedly, the pups rushed forward, leaving Armin’s lap empty and feet once again bare. They dove underneath the mother, leaping excitedly upward against her belly.

Another tongue, longer and broader, laved Armin’s face from chin to brow. He blinked, pulse slowing in relief, but he didn’t dare put out a hand to pet her as he had with the pups. Remembering how some dogs in Shiganshina had reacted to aggressors, he let his head droop on his neck, then eased himself back down again to the den floor. Stretching out on his back, he held his hands and feet loosely in the air.

The mother dipped her head to lick at his face again, as well as his hair. The faint light from the distant entrance flowed over her, picking out thick, rounded ears set atop a massive skull.

 _That’s…_

Armin’s brain couldn’t supply the rest of the thought.

He didn’t feel afraid. That wasn’t the right word for it. But there was something hovering far too close to the surface of his mind to let him feel comfortable. Like a word on the tip of his tongue, but, rather than being unable to think of it, he didn’t _want_ to think of it.

The mother sank down an arm’s length away from him and stretched out. The pups seemed to dive-bomb her belly; with her silhouetted against the far entrance, Armin could no longer see them, but immediately he began to hear the sounds of messy, enthusiastic sucking. She tilted her head back, and her eyes, now more visible in the strengthening light, caught Armin’s and held them.

Narrow, oblong eyes, tilted nearly vertical, and set deep.

The thing just below the surface of his mind broke through.

 _But…_ His brain was spinning furiously now, digging itself into half-forgotten facts as if into dusty piles of paper in some forgotten archive. _Wolves don’t have cubs in the autumn. They have them in the spring. They always have them in the spr—_

His mind ground to a halt again, and he could envision dusty papers fluttering down around him.

Armin had never been very good at shutting off his mind on his own. The military had taught him to, somewhat, after so many nights of poor rest and so many mornings staggering bleary-eyed around the training yard while Shadis bawled him out for his uselessness. Kicking his brain into motion, however? He was a champion at that.

But not, strangely, right now. It wasn’t the mindlessness of panic: he felt lax, placid, unruffled. But trying to think just now was like trying to pick up and move a massive boulder on his own. Or trying to do so to the creature lying before him.

He had turned onto his right side and been indolently watching the mother and pups (the _cubs_ , he thought). He could still hear them feeding, but there was barely enough light to actually see them pawing and suckling at her mammae. _Teats. (Shut up, Jean, that’s what they’re called.)_ He pushed the words out of his head just as one cub, the first to have run forward, loosened its hold on its mother’s teat and stood. It turned and trotted up to Armin and licked his face, giving him a whiff of both milk and musk.

His stomach chose at that moment to growl like a full-grown wolf about to launch itself into a fight.

 _Shit._ The last time he had eaten was… He still had no idea how long he’d been unconscious before he woke up on the bank of the Rasch, or how long he’d been in the den. But he’d last eaten in the early afternoon before Shadis had stopped them to make camp. A hard-baked ration bar made of flour, dried apple, and a bit of jerky, washed down with water. The rest of the march, his frantic thrashings in the river, his body’s desperate attempts to warm itself: all of that had burned off everything left in his belly. And, to boot, he was thirsty again.

The cub settled down against him. Armin lifted his head to see the mother staring at him again. She made a grunt that he couldn’t remember ever having heard from a dog.

_What…?_

Armin stared back, vaguely uneasy that she might interpret his gaze as a challenge, but not sure he should look away, either. The other cubs detached themselves from her teats one by one and tottered about the den, sated and for the most part quiet.

The mother rose on her lanky forelegs and leaned toward Armin. She tucked her long muzzle behind his neck and pushed his head forward. The first cub scuttled out from between them with a soft yip of disgruntlement.

“Um,” Armin said, feeling bewildered and uncertain and … _awkward_. He hadn’t realized one could even feel awkward with anything other than humans. He wondered if the men in Sasha’s tale had been too embarrassed to mention this part of their unlikely adventure.

He’d become accustomed to the musky scent, he’d thought, but the mother’s shaggy underbelly absolutely radiated it. Breathing through his mouth, Armin realized, wasn’t going to be an option. He curled up against her underfur and let himself adjust to the odor at full strength, as well as to the humid warmth. Then he cupped his hand around a teat that… well, not that he had any standard by which to judge, but it didn’t feel empty. He put his mouth around the thick, tough nipple and, stomach roiling a bit ( _am I going to gag and throw it all up afterward?_ ), began to suck.

The milk was musky. He’d prepared himself for that. The tinges of rainwater and leaf in it, he guessed, he could have expected as well. He hadn’t considered how rich it would be. It made sense, he supposed; she-wolves nurtured new generations of powerful hunters. Trainees almost never ate anything so rich, other than when someone’s mother sent them cheese or cake in a care package, which wasn’t often — and if that someone deigned to share, which was even less often. Armin worried that his stomach would reject the milk because of that, rather than from disgust. He suckled as much as he felt able to take, then pulled off from the nipple and rested his head against the thick, warm shag.

The mother lowered her head and began to lick his hair again. The impulse to stop her, as he would have stopped a dog from doing, seemed pointless given how filthy he was overall. Also maybe a little… impolite.

Something else came back to him from his grandfather’s book: an old, old story about twin brothers who’d founded a great city. When they were newborns, their wicked uncle had thrown them into a river to drown, but the river had carried them to safety — and a she-wolf had suckled them. The city’s symbol had been a she-wolf with two human babies underneath her, each suckling at a teat.

Armin started to laugh; the wolf continued to lick his hair, unperturbed. _If we ever kill all the titans and build cities outside the walls,_ he thought, _I’m going to make that the symbol of one city. With just one human baby in the symbol._ It was, for reasons he couldn’t have begun to explain, the funniest thing he’d thought or heard in weeks. He continued to chuckle as he lay against the belly of a creature who by all rights should not exist and who was grooming him as if he were one of her own.

His laughter had died out but the mother wolf’s tongue was still smoothing down his hair as he slipped into clouded, chaotic dreams.

*

“Armin! Armin Arlert!”

_….what….?_

After the sound of his own name, the next thing to penetrate the fog in his brain was that he was cold again. Not as cold as he’d been before. But pretty damned cold. His feet were as cold as his hands this time, and the left side of his body felt as if he’d been dragged again — and this time through a bed of gravel. Why wasn’t he in the den, still?

He could feel footsteps reverberating through the ground. Not those of a titan. Just an ordinary full-grown human wearing military-issue boots. Where the hell were his own boots…?

“Luke! I got ‘im!”

The boots came to a stop a short distance from his head, and their owner crouched down. Armin raised his head and stared up into a youngish face with a thin mustache and a fringe of a beard. A white bandana covered the top of the man’s head; three-dimensional maneuver gear and sword scabbards hung at his hips.

“Shit, kid, you look like a drowned rat.” He grabbed Armin under the arms and hoisted him up; Armin made no resistance. “And you smell like a wet dog,” he grunted. “Why the fuck’d you take off your boots in this weather?”

“Hypothermia,” another man’s voice answered. “Sometimes people go crazy and think they’re burning up instead of freezing to death, and they strip off their clothes.”

“He’s got the rest of his clothes on, though,” the first man said. “Grab his boots for me, wouldja?”

“Sure. Sheesh, he _does_ smell like a wet dog. Where the hell would he find dogs out here?”

“Some people drove their dogs out of Rose when Maria fell.” The first man slung Armin’s body face-down across his sturdy back and shoulders, shifting him into the most comfortable position for carrying. “Thought they’d give them a chance to fend for themselves, rather than let ‘em be slaughtered for food. Not sure it was kinder in the long run, honestly.”

The second man — Luke — strode up alongside them; he had a thin, sallow face and a short black ponytail, and he was equipped the same as the first. “Never seen any dogs out here before, Dita.”

_‘Out here **before** ’….?_

“Eventually you will,” the man carrying Armin — Dita — said. “If you live long enough, that is.” Luke snorted.

Armin’s left cheek was resting against the solid muscle of Dita’s shoulder, covered in a military jacket. He looked down, squinted a little in the dim light to make out the patch on the jacket arm.

Not the crossed swords of the Trainee Legion. A pair of wings, blue overlapped on white.

“Maybe it wasn’t a dog,” Luke was saying. “Couldn’t it have been a fox? Maybe even a wolf?”

Armin felt Dita’s back heave once beneath him in a scoff. “Yeah, right, city boy. Foxes hide from humans, unless they’re rabid. So do wolves, actually, if they can. But if a wolf couldn’t have gotten away from him? Trust me, it wouldn’t have left him alive.”

*

“Feeling any warmer now?” asked the medical apprentice, whom Armin guessed to be about seventeen. His languid Sina drawl couldn’t conceal the nervous fussiness in his voice.

“Yes, thank you, sir,” Armin said groggily. The apprentice wasn’t an officer, quite possibly not even military, but after more than six months in training you never addressed your elders without automatically appending _sir_ and _ma’am_ to the end of your words. Armin tipped his head back against the edge of the wooden tub and stared without focus at the cracked ceiling of the small room they were in.

Luke had jammed Armin’s boots back onto his legs before the two Survey Corpsmen had mounted their horses, and Dita had wrapped him in his own cloak and held him against his chest the entire ride back to Southern Division HQ. Still, the wind as they rode had continued to suck warmth out of him, and the jostling of his abrasions against both Dita and the horse had left tears running down Armin’s face. He’d blotted them away with his still-damp arm as Dita hefted him again onto his shoulders and carried him into the infirmary, Luke trailing them.

The medic on duty had said he didn’t look as bad off as Shadis’s messenger had led her to believe, but she wasn’t taking any chances. She and the apprentice had stripped him naked, but, rather than bathe him, they’d gently swabbed as much of the filth off him as they could with soapy towels. Then they’d daubed his wounds with willow and arnica salve, wrapped him in a fresh cloak with two hot water bottles, and pulled the hood down over his head. His torso needed to get warm before his limbs did, the medic had explained. Armin had nodded, passively letting the apprentice lay him supine on a cot with a pillow under his head and then spoon hot broth into his mouth.

After pulling up his eyelids to examine his pupils, the medic had asked him his name, his age, his hometown, his training division, the current year, and the name of the king. After he’d answered each question correctly — her lip had curled and her eyes had softened at the word _Shiganshina_ — she’d pronounced him extremely lucky. For the next hour or two he was left on the cot, where he alternated dozing with staring into space. He’d been resisting the urge to chafe his hands or feet together, mindful of what he’d been told, but as they began to throb with the return of circulation he began to gingerly rub each against its counterpart, trying to relieve the discomfort.

Eventually the medic declared that a bath would be safe and instructed the apprentice to draw it. The young man had insisted on picking Armin up bodily and setting him into the tub. His hands and feet stung at first, as did the scrapes on his body, but mostly the heat felt wonderful. Armin let out a groan that made the apprentice blush; if he hadn’t felt so drained he might have found it amusing. The older boy covered up his embarrassment with a blustering insistence on helping him wash, scoffing at Armin’s weak protests that he could shift for himself — at least until all of Armin’s upper body had been scrubbed, at which point the apprentice cleared his throat and passed the washcloth to Armin.

When the knock came, Armin closed his eyes. Dealing with the apprentice was tiring enough right now; he hoped that wasn’t Shadis or another officer looking to speak with him right now. He heard the older boy walk to the door and open it, heard two soft simultaneous thumps, and heard Eren say, “We’re here to see Armin Arlert, sir.”

“Um. Well, _you_ can come in, but your, uh, friend there can’t.”

“Why not?” Eren demanded.

“Because he’s naked!” the apprentice exclaimed indignantly. “It’s not decent!”

There was a sigh, then another familiar voice, speaking with the flat weariness of someone three times its owner’s age. “We all grew up together. We’ve seen each other naked hundreds of times. And I’m a soldier, too. I’ve seen everybody in the Southern Division take a piss in the field at one time or another. Stand back.”

The apprentice continued to splutter, but two sets of booted feet moved firmly into the room. Armin opened his eyes again.

“Hey,” Eren said, his own eyes wide and serious. “Fuck, look at that gash on your forehead.” He knelt down by one side of the tub, Mikasa by the other, as the door slammed shut. Eren raised his head again to glare at it. “What the hell is _his_ problem? Uptight Sina asshole.”

“You just answered your own question,” Armin said, his voice still slow and weary. “And I don’t think he’s military—”

“Definitely not military,” Mikasa said.

“—just medical, here to get some practice. Not used to … things here.” Mikasa entering the room was, technically speaking, a violation of military protocol, but if the Trainee Legion was occasionally lax on anything at all, it was modesty. “Aren’t you both still supposed to be on the hike?”

Mikasa shook her head. “Shadis cut it short. After an hour and a half he sent Sasha, Marco and me down to the river. We saw the bank, we found the bucket with its handle caught in some water weeds, we figured out what happened. Shadis didn’t want us searching in the dark, in case more of the bank caved in. He had a few people ride to a nearby village. The villagers said the riverbanks have been unstable lately, with all the heavy rains after the drought. They sent some boatmen out with torches. They couldn’t find anything in the Rose stretch of the river or on the banks, and they wouldn’t go through the wall arch into Maria.”

“Fucking cowards,” Eren muttered.

Mikasa shrugged. “They’re not soldiers, just fishermen and river pilots. They couldn’t have fought off titans. If they’d been eaten it wouldn’t have helped us, and their families would have suffered. Anyway, we were all pretty upset.”

“Jean was _crying,_ ” Eren said. “I couldn’t believe it.”

Armin’s brows rose. “Really?”

“Really, he was,” Mikasa said. “Shadis sent a few other riders out to Ehrmich to get the Survey Corpsmen, and at first light he turned the rest of us around and marched us back here.”

She fell silent, blinking rapidly, as Eren was also doing. Each of them picked up one of Armin’s hands and chafed it gently. Armin curled his fingers over the sides of their hands, and they squeezed back.

“Are you up to telling us the whole story?” Mikasa asked.

“I’m not sure I know the whole story,” Armin said. Eren looked puzzled, and Armin added, “What have you heard so far?”

“Well, obviously, that you were swept outside of Rose,” Eren said. “Through the arch.”

“Yeah… I gathered as much.”

“You gathered— you saw a titan, didn’t you?” Eren’s eyes were wide again, his lips drawing back in a snarl.

Armin sighed. “Yeah… it’s fine, I wasn’t hurt, don’t get upset.” Eren subsided a little, but the hard look in his eyes remained. Mikasa’s face was unreadable. “But also, they wouldn’t have sent Survey Corpsmen to look for me inside Rose. I did see their badges when they found me.”

“We wanted to go with them,” Eren said. “Shadis said no, the Survey Corps guys said no. I begged, and Shadis yelled at me that if I didn’t shut up about it he’d make me run ten laps for every syllable.” Mikasa’s mouth quirked.

“Kinda surprised you didn’t sneak out anyway,” Armin said, then sat up straight when Eren’s expression changed to a guilty one. “No — Eren.” He tightened his grip around Eren’s hand. “I’m glad you didn’t. It would’ve been dangerous.”

“Then what the fuck are we training for?” Eren muttered, staring at the floor.

“Nothing to do with you and Mikasa, everything to do with politics and protocol.” Armin settled back against the tub rim. “The Corpsmen probably didn’t want to be saddled with two trainees a year short of graduation, even highly competent ones. And Shadis is responsible for us, but he can’t control what happens outside the walls.”

Eren scowled. “I suppose.”

“What else have you heard?”

“Oh…” Eren rolled his eyes. “One of the Corpsmen was telling people you smelled like a wet dog when they found you. It got around. So Sasha’s been bragging to everybody that she was right. That you must have run into a ‘ghost wolf.’” He shook his head. Mikasa smirked.

Armin said nothing, just dropped his eyes and stared down into the water.

“…Armin?” Eren said. “What…?”

He looked up again, breathed in deeply, and told them everything.

After he’d finished, they were silent for a long, long while. Eren’s eyes were wide again, his mouth open. Mikasa’s eyebrows seemed to have made a new home in her hair. Finally, Eren half-whispered, “Are you serious, Armin?”

“I… I don’t know.” Armin, who’d let go of their hands at some point so he could gesticulate, idly splashed the surface of the water a little with his right hand. It was cool now and somewhat grey. “I mean… hypothermia can make you hallucinate. I was awfully cold, all stiff and shaking, and it was hard to think or even just perceive things around me. Maybe I imagined everything, even being warm again. One of the Corpsmen said that people with hypothermia sometimes do that. Maybe that was why I’d taken off my boots.”

“But it wouldn’t explain the wet dog smell,” Mikasa said.

“The other Corpsman said there’s feral dogs outside Rose. Maybe one of them curled up against me because I looked like its old owner or something. Or maybe I crawled into a hollow that smelled of dog, then crawled out again.”

“But then there’s the titan,” Eren said. “It picked you up, but something stopped it.”

“Maybe I hallucinated the titan, too,” Armin said.

None of them spoke for another, shorter while.

“What are you going to tell them when they debrief you?” Mikasa finally asked.

Armin sighed. “Probably that I was unconscious the whole time after I went face first into that river rock. Or most of the time, and I was hallucinating all kinds of things, so they can’t trust anything I might remember as having really happened.” He gave a low, mirthless chuckle. “I’ll tell them I saw and heard my grandfather speaking to me. I doubt they’ll ask me anything else after that.”

Eren’s mouth twisted hard, and he looked down at the floor again. Mikasa’s face went carefully void of expression.

“We’re not going to say anything,” Eren said finally. “To anyone.”

“Yeah… I know.” Armin rubbed his face, flinching when he accidentally touched the wound on his forehead. “Thank you.”

“No thanks necessary,” Mikasa said quietly.

Armin let go of Eren’s and Mikasa’s hands, drew his knees up to his chest, wrapped his arms around them, and buried his face against them.

“We can’t stay much longer,” Eren said. “Shadis wants me on raking duty and Mikasa chopping firewood this afternoon. How much longer are they keeping you in the infirmary?”

“Probably until morning,” Armin said without raising his head, his voice muffled. “It’s warmer in here than it is in the barracks.”

“So we’ll see you at breakfast, then?” Mikasa asked.

“Yeah, I think so.”

Armin heard the fabric of their uniforms rustle as both of them rose. He lifted his head, blinking hard, and held out his hands again. Each of them took one and squeezed it, and again he squeezed back.

“Armin?” Eren said, his voice shaking a little. “Don’t ever fucking do anything like that again.”

Armin gave him a weak smile. “I’ll try my best not to. Especially at any other time of the year.”

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by an older SnKKink prompt for Armin becoming lost in the wilderness and getting whumped with either heatstroke or hypothermia. The more I thought about a potential fill, the more taken I became with the idea of Armin being rescued by a wolf. No more implausible than the concept of titans, right? Then, the more thought I devoted to that scenario, the more I wanted the wolf to be somehow supernatural — especially the closer we got to Halloween. Not what the kinkmeme OP requested, so not a kinkmeme fill, just a story for this time of year.
> 
> Thanks to [undomielregina](http://archiveofourown.org/users/undomielregina) for her quick beta of this story. Thanks also to another friend of mine, not familiar with SnK, for looking it over as well.
> 
> There are many online resources for research on hypothermia, but [this harrowing story from _Outside_ magazine](http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/As-Freezing-Persons-Recollect-the-Snow--First-Chill--Then-Stupor--Then-the-Letting-Go.html), despite the narrative being geared toward extreme winter weather, is my primary go-to. For specific differences between dogs and wolves, I relied on [this article from the Yamnuska Wolfdog Sanctuary](http://yamnuskawolfdogsanctuary.com/resources/wolf-to-woof/physical-differences-between-wolves-and-dogs/). The [Alaska Fish & Game website](http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlifenews.view_article&articles_id=76%0A), as well as [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_wolf#Habitat), provide helpful descriptions of wolf dens. [A lycophile and photographer on Tumblr](http://wolveswolves.tumblr.com/post/55766726298/a-slightly-unusual-question-what-do-wolves-smell) who has encountered many wolves offers a description of what they smell like. And, finally, [someone out there has made cheese out of dog milk](http://www.rootsimple.com/2007/04/dog-cheese/), which was helpful to me for coming up with descriptors of what wolf milk might taste like.


End file.
